Day 3: Beat the Machines

We tend to post sketches and rough illustrations of stories as we storyboard/draw them, but the writing side of it goes through a rough draft/editing process also. Here are a couple scans of notes Darryl took while reporting a story last fall. That was during the first months of our project—when we weren’t entirely sure what we were doing.

The “story” became a 1-page summary of our guided trip/tour through the Fisk coal plant in Pilsen.

Over the last two years Darryl has written several stories about Chicago’s two coal-fired power plants for the Columbia Chronicle and ChicagoTalks.org. In that time, organizations like PERRO, LVEJO and Chicago’s Clean Power Coalition have relentlessly researched the harmful impact on the local, mostly minority, residential populations surrounding the plants; held dozens of meetings, including protests and City Council sessions and kept issues of urban environmental responsibility on the political agenda.

Long story short, it’s been interesting to see this issue evolve from both sides. We’ve gotten to see the coal machines process coal and spend time with the groups and communities determined to shut the machines down.

It’s good to see people beat the machines.

Anyway, here are 4-pages out of a stack of 4″x8″ notebooks (Darryl ran our of pages midway through the tour and had to use the backboard):

Sidenote: Original artwork and notes are part of the rewards offered on our Kickstarter! Help us beat the machines.